Tapped calls reveal jokes, rows over Cascade millions

''I'VE made some wild assumptions but we want money [laughs] and we don't give a f--- how we get there [more laughter],'' joked investment banker Richard Poole on a covertly recorded telephone.

Mr Poole spent a second gruelling day in the witness box at the Independent Commission Against Corruption listening to a number of embarrassing, expletive-laden intercepted phone calls being played.

The commission is inquiring into the role Mr Poole played in the allegedly corrupt granting of a coal exploration licence to his company Cascade Coal in 2009 by then NSW mining minister Ian Macdonald.

In one call, intercepted in April last year, Mr Poole shared a joke with Greg Jones, one of Mr Macdonald's closest friends, about their attempts to make big amounts of money from Cascade.

Mr Poole and Mr Jones were part of a syndicate of seven wealthy businessmen - their collective worth being about $2 billion - who owned Cascade Coal.

Cascade won what is now alleged to have been a rigged tender. The Magnificent Seven, as they have been dubbed, stood to make another $60 million each when White Energy announced it would buy Cascade for $500 million in early 2011.

Five of the seven men were also directors of White Energy, a company listed on the stock exchange.

Mr Poole, 49, had great difficulty using the dreaded ''O'' word - Obeid - while giving evidence and repeatedly claimed he did not know or had only a ''deep suspicion'' that the family of the controversial Labor Upper House MP Eddie Obeid had secured a 25 per cent stake in Cascade.

The commission has heard that Graham Cubbin, who headed White Energy's independent board, was repeatedly fobbed off by the Cascade syndicate when he tried to learn whether the Obeid family was involved in Cascade.

When asked why he had concealed a $30 million payment from Cascade to the Obeids via a front company, Southeast Investments, Mr Poole responded: ''I wasn't actively concealing it but I was never asked.''

''Well, why didn't you tell him that, that you strongly suspected that the Obeids were behind Southeast, why did you not tell him that?'' counsel assisting, Geoffrey Watson, SC, asked.

''At any point in time Graham Cubbin … could have asked me any other question [he] wanted.''

Other calls, between Mr Jones and Moses Obeid, one of Mr Obeid's three sons, were played. The pair are heard arguing about the failure of the Cascade syndicate to pay the Obeid family the second half of the $60 million the Obeids had been promised.

Following the angry exchange with Mr Moses Obeid, Mr Jones then rang Mr Poole. ''I've just had a bloody big blue with our, um, Irish Catholic mates, said Mr Jones about the Obeids. Describing Moses as a ''stupid prick'' and the Obeids as '''paranoid idiots'' and ''off with the pixies'', Mr Jones complained about their eagerness to get the deal done.

The inquiry has heard that the Obeids are still agitating for their second $30 million.